The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “Was the mural corny? Yes. But Del had a streak of romance that went right through him, along with a streak of irony; and the band building the casino absolutely loved the mural; and we needed the money.

  “Of course, most of the time when I went down, I saw white plaster and scaffolding. The mural was a work in progress. I nursed little Delores and watched Del or talked with the band treasurer, who was a woman, a big matron with gray hair. The first dribbles of gambling money had gotten her a fine set of new teeth, but it couldn’t do anything about the lines in her face. Marion Forte. A good name. She was as strong and solid as a fort. She took to me once she discovered I was Lakota. ‘I have nothing against the Ojibwa,’ she told me. ‘Even though they used to be our enemies. But the Lakota are our cousins. How did you manage to marry an Ojibwa?’

  “I told her I wasn’t sure. It simply happened. She nodded. ‘That’s possible. He is a good painter, even though those eagles shouldn’t be up there. We aren’t close enough to the Mississippi. And those hunters are overdressed, unless they’re going to war. All that paint and feathers! No one hunted bison that way.’

  “I told her I had wondered about that, and she laughed. ‘Most of the council are men. They wanted to see warriors, but they didn’t want people to come in and see a war. This is a place to have fun. We can’t have blood in the lobby.’

  “She was an easy woman to talk to, about the age my mother would have been, if she had lived, and both sharp and kind. So I told her about Clara and Rosa and my childhood and my current life. In the end – it was inevitable – I told her about the freezers in the basement, and the tissue which was an inheritance and problem.

  “Marion looked thoughtful. ‘Mammoths,’ she said. ‘No wonder Del has painted them. He’s living with what’s left of them.’ That was the end of the conversation.” My grandmother looked at me. “But you must know the next part of the story.”

  I nodded. “She went to the council and said, they should put money into research.”

  “Yes,” said Grandmother. “And they refused. They were too new to having money. They wanted it for themselves and rest of the band and for the casino, so they could make more money.”

  “ ‘Men never think ahead,’ Marion said. ‘That’s why they make good warriors. The council president came back from Korea with a chest full of medals. He has never looked beyond the next hill in his entire life. Well, this hill is the new casino. Let’s wait and see what lies on the other side.’

  “I went home and looked at the bank balance and sent out my resume. Del was getting paid well for the mural, but that money wouldn’t last; and our utility bills were high.”

  Grandmother shrugged. “Why make a long story longer than it is by nature? The Prairie Lake council voted to set up a foundation. It took another four years, with Marion pushing at every meeting; but it finally happened. By then Del had a job teaching at the Minneapolis College of Art, and he’d even had a show in a white museum – not his current work, but the older abstractions. Young Delores was old enough for day care, though she didn’t like it. How your mother yelled the first time I left her!

  “The University got the first grant for mammoth research; and I went to work for the research lab. The U had no choice. I came with the money and the mammoth tissue. Did I feel guilty, using the tissue and the Prairie Lake band’s clout? Not a bit. It was the 1990s by then, the last great hurrah of capitalism before the dark days of the early 21st century. The white people were busy grabbing everything they could with both hands. I thought, I could do a little of the same, enough to pay the bills and get myself back into research.

  “Of course the people in the lab resented me, a woman and an Indian, who had gotten her job through luck and casino money. How could I be any good? I won’t bother you with the story of my struggles. This story is about the mammoths, not me. But always remember that power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. ‘If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation . . . want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters . . .’ ”

  At the time I did not recognize the quote. It was Frederick Douglass, of course. Odd to hear my grandmother talk about the ocean on the bone-dry Dakota prairie.

  “The first several grants came from Prairie Lake. Then other money began to come in, as the lab reported its first success, which was decoding mammoth and elephant DNA and finding out that mammoths were closely related to Asian elephants. The next step was obvious, though not easy: building a viable mammoth egg and implanting it in an elephant.” Grandmother smiled. “Imagine what a statement that is! It used to be, we could not imagine re-creating extinct animals, except maybe in science fiction stories. Now we have the quagga – the real quagga, not the bred-back version; and the giant ground sloth, though I’m not sure what use it is, except as an exhibit in a zoo. And we have two species of mammoths, though the Siberian species is a genetic patchwork. Still, it’s different enough from our Missouri mammoths to be called a separate species.

  “I have to say, my contribution to the research was not key; and I did my own best work later in another area. But I still remember – how could I ever forget? – the morning when the first baby mammoth was born and helped to stand by a vet and the surrogate mother’s mahout. The rest of us watched on a monitor. The calf was tiny, unsteady, wet and very hairy. The mother fondled it with her trunk, unsurprised – as far as we could tell – by all the hair.

  “The first species brought back from extinction! Not from the edge of extinction, but from the void beyond the edge! The research team broke out champagne, and the Prairie Lake band ordered new commercials for their casino starring the baby. That led to a fight, but the band had good lawyers, and the grants had been carefully written. Prairie Lake owned the right to publicize any results of the research they funded. My colleagues at the U made angry jokes about Indian givers. But the band never asked for its money back. It simply wanted its share of the results, which included – ultimately – enough mammoths to start their own herd. Always be careful what you sign, Emma.”

  She stopped and leaned back, her eyes closed. It was a long story. Of course, I felt pride. My family had helped save the Missouri mammoths, though most of the mammoths lived north and west of us. The great river was diminishing, due to lack of snow in the Rockies; and the moist bottom lands the mammoths needed no longer existed.

  “There’s one good side to that,” Grandmother said. “They blew up the Oahe Dam. That damn lake is gone. It never looked natural, and it took so much of our land. Though it didn’t do to us what it did to the Mandan and Hidatsa and Akikawa. They lost their entire reservation. I know it happened in another century, and I know that people shouldn’t hold grudges. Life has gotten better for us and many people. But I hated that lake. I could dance on the dry land where it used to be. In fact I do. That’s where we hold the annual Standing Rock powwow.”

  She didn’t say ‘powwow.’ She said ‘wacipi,’ which is the Lakota word. But I knew what she meant.

  “It would have happened, anyway,” Grandmother said. “They would have built mammoths from other DNA. Rosa wasn’t the only person who kept tissue, though hers was the best. So don’t feel too proud, young Miss Emma. History is a collaborative process. The important thing is to be a part of history and on the right side, which is not always easy to determine. It’s not enough to hold onto the past, though we Indians proved that losing the past is dangerous. We almost died of trying to be white. Not that white people have done much better. They almost destroyed the planet by getting and spending and laying waste.

  “What do we keep from the past? What do we discard? How do we change? These are all important questions, which all of us have to answer. The mammoths are important, though they may not graze by the Missouri again in our lifetimes. But the bison are back – over a million; and the herds are still
growing; and you can see them here on Standing Rock. There’s plenty left to do to remake the planet, but we have achieved a fair amount already. One step forward and two steps back, and then one or two or three steps forward. We dance into the future like dancers in a Grand Entry.”

  At the end of every visit, I went home, rocking through Standing Rock past the grazing bison. My mother’s second cousin Thelma in Minot gave me dinner and a bed. In the morning, I rode the eastbound rocket train. Windmills turned. The train glided through forest. My parents waited on the platform in Minneapolis. If I wanted to see mammoths, I could go to Mammoth Treasure Park by the casino. They were there, wading in an artificial river and spraying each other with water, their ancient eyes glittering with pleasure. Above them in the blue sky might be eagles. They have grown so common that they are everywhere these days.

  SLEEPING DOGS

  Joe Haldeman

  Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the seventies. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1984 for the best science fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula in 1990 and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of “The Hemingway Hoax.” His story “None So Blind” won the Hugo Award in 1995. His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II), Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, The Hemingway Hoax, Tool of the Trade, The Coming, the mainstream novel 1968, Camouflage, which won the prestigious James Tiptree, Jr., Award, Old Twentieth, and The Accidental Time Machine. His short work has been gathered in the collections Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, None So Blind, A Separate War and Other Stories, and an omnibus of fiction and nonfiction, War Stories. As editor, he has produced the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, Nebula Award Stories Seventeen, and, with Martin H. Greenberg, Future Weapons of War. His most recent books are two new science fiction novels, Marsbound and its sequel, Starbound. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.

  Here he gives us a deeply cynical study of the ways in which future governments could manipulate the flow of information reaching their citizens even more effectively than they do today. . . .

  THE CAB TOOK my eyeprint and the door swung open. I was glad to get out. No driver to care how rough the ride was, on a road that wouldn’t even be called a road on Earth. The place had gone downhill in the thirty years I’d been away.

  Low gravity and low oxygen. My heart was going too fast. I stood for a moment, concentrating, and brought it down to a hundred, then ninety. The air had more sulfur sting than I remembered. It seemed a lot warmer than I remembered that summer, too, but then if I could remember it all I wouldn’t have to be here. My missing finger throbbed.

  Six identical buildings on the block, half-cylinders of stained pale green plastic. I walked up the dirt path to number 3: Offworld Affairs and Confederación Liaison. I almost ran into the door when it didn’t open. Pushed and pulled and it reluctantly let me inside.

  It was a little cooler and less sulfurous. I went to the second door on the right, Travel Documents and Permissions, and went in.

  “You don’t knock on Earth?” A cadaverous tall man, skin too white and hair too black.

  “Actually, no,” I said, “not public buildings. But I apologize for my ignorance.”

  He looked at a monitor built into his desk. “You would be Flann Spivey, from Japan on Earth. You don’t look Japanese.”

  “I’m Irish,” I said. “I work for a Japanese company, Ichiban Imaging.”

  He touched a word on the screen. “Means number one. Best, or first?”

  “Both, I think.”

  “Papers.” I laid out two passports and a folder of travel documents. He spent several minutes inspecting them carefully. Then he slipped them into a primitive scanning machine, which flipped through them one by one, page by page.

  He finally handed them back. “When you were here twenty-nine Earth years ago, there were only eight countries on Seca, representing two competing powers. Now there are 79 countries, two of them offplanet, in a political situation that’s . . . impossible to describe simply. Most of the other 78 countries are more comfortable than Spaceport. Nicer.”

  “So I was told. I’m not here for comfort, though.” There weren’t many planets where they put their spaceports in nice places.

  He nodded slowly as he selected two forms from a drawer. “So what does a ‘thanatopic counselor’ do?”

  “I prepare people for dying.” For living completely, actually, before they leave.

  “Curious.” He smiled. “It pays well?”

  “Adequately.”

  He handed me the forms. “I’ve never seen a poor person come through that door. Take these down the hall to Immunization.”

  “I’ve had all the shots.”

  “All that the Confederación requires. Seca has a couple of special tests for returning veterans. Of the Consolidation War.”

  “Of course. The nanobiota. But I was tested before they let me return to Earth.”

  He shrugged. “Rules. What do you tell them?”

  “Tell?”

  “The people who are going to die. We just sort of let it catch up with us. Avoid it as long as possible, but . . .”

  “That’s a way.” I took the forms. “Not the only way.”

  I had the door partly open when he cleared his throat. “Dr. Spivey? If you don’t have any plans, I would be pleased to have midmeal with you.”

  Interesting. “Sure. I don’t know how long this will take . . .”

  “Ten minims, fifteen. I’ll call us a floater, so we don’t have to endure the road.”

  The blood and saliva samples took less time than filling out the forms. When I went back outside, the floater was humming down and Braz Nitian was watching it land from the walkway.

  It was a fast two-minute hop to the center of town, the last thirty seconds disconcerting free fall. The place he’d chosen was Kaffee Rembrandt, a rough-hewn place with a low ceiling and guttering oil lamps in pursuit of a 16th-century ambience, somewhat diluted by the fact that the dozens of Rembrandt reproductions glowed with apparently sourceless illumination.

  A busty waitress in period flounce showed us to a small table, dwarfed by a large self-portrait of the artist posed as “Prodigal Son with a Whore.”

  I’d never seen an actual flagon, a metal container with a hinged top. It appeared to hold enough wine to support a meal and some conversation.

  I ordered a plate of braised vegetables, following conservative dietary advice – the odd proteins in Seca’s animals and fish might lay me low with a xeno-allergy. Among the things I didn’t remember about my previous time here was whether our rations had included any native flesh or fish. But even if I’d safely eaten them thirty years ago, the Hartford doctor said, I could have a protein allergy now, since an older digestive system might not completely break down those alien proteins into safe amino acids.

  Braz had gone to college on Earth, UCLA, an expensive proposition that obligated him to work for the government for ten years (which would be fourteen Earth years). H
e had degrees in mathematics and macroeconomics, neither of which he used in his office job. He taught three nights a week and wrote papers that nine or ten people read and disagreed with.

  “So how did you become a thanatopic counselor? Something you always wanted to be when you grew up?”

  “Yeah, after cowboy and pirate.”

  He smiled. “I never saw a cowboy on Earth.”

  “Pirates tracked them down and made them walk the plank. Actually, I was an accountant when I joined the military, and then started out in pre-med after I was discharged, but switched over to psychology and moved into studying veterans.”

  “Natural enough. Know thyself.”

  “Literally.” Find thyself, I thought. “You get a lot of us coming through?”

  “Well, not so many, not from Earth or other foreign planets. Being a veteran doesn’t correlate well with wealth.”

  “That’s for sure.” And a trip from Earth to Seca and back costs as much as a big house.

  “I imagine that treating veterans doesn’t generate a lot of money, either.” Eyebrows lifting.

  “A life of crime does.” I smiled and he laughed politely. “But most of the veterans I do see are well off. Almost nobody with a normal life span needs my services. They’re mostly for people who’ve lived some centuries, and you couldn’t do that without wealth.”

  “They get tired of life?”

  “Not the way you or I could become tired of a game, or a relationship. It’s something deeper than running out of novelty. People with that little imagination don’t need me. They can stop existing for the price of a bullet or a rope – or a painless prescription, where I come from.”

  “Not legal here,” he said neutrally.

  “I know. I’m not enthusiastic about it, myself.”

  “You’d have more customers?”